Christmas Gifts for the Music Geek In Your Life

‘Tis the season to be spending money you don’t have on consumer items, and spending the rest of the next year paying off your credit card bills. Merry Christmas, everyone! But if there’s a music lover on your list of people to get gifts for, you can at least rest happily in the knowledge that some of your cash has gone toward buying something you’d want for yourself. Or, of course, you can eschew the whole gifting thing and just buy some of this stuff for yourself. Either way, here are some of the things that hit the shelves this year that’d totally be on our Christmas list if someone was buying for us. Hint, hint.

This has rather slipped under our radar, and seems to have slipped beneath everyone else’s too. It’s a box set of all Leonard Cohen’s studio albums, from 1967’s Songs of Leonard Cohen right up to 2004’s Dear Heather. This is all well and good, but the thing is that these aren’t just reissues of albums that should be in your collection anyway — they’re also remasters, a fact which hasn’t exactly been trumpeted by the Sony marketing department (it gets a quiet mention on definitive Cohen website The Leonard Cohen Files, but that’s about it). Anyway, this fact definitely makes the set worth a look, even if you own these albums already, and especially since the thing’s a steal at about $6 an album. If you’re feeling extravagant, there’s also a 17-album set that includes all Cohen’s live records and a 36-page booklet.